Trading for Everyone

Trading is awesome! Everyone should trade stocks. The benefits that
trading brings to anyone who sticks with it are vast. They spill over into
and enrich all aspects of our lives, in a myriad of ways extending far beyond
the obvious financial rewards. And it's never too late or too early to start
learning this fascinating and empowering art.

Trading is something I've loved my entire life. When I was growing up my father
was a small-town banker, so he was naturally interested in the financial world.
On Friday nights I remember watching Louis Rukeyser's Wall $treet Week on public
television with my Dad. I remember him reading the Wall Street Journal, and
encouraging me to do so when he came across articles that would interest a
young boy.

When I was 12, my father opened a brokerage account for me. Of course back
then you had to actually call your broker on the telephone to make a trade,
so it was certainly intimidating at first. Trading, and really anything new,
always is. But I bought some stock in IBM and never looked back from there.
I saved income from my summer jobs including fishing golf balls out of water
traps, mowing lawns, and painting houses. I invested some of my meager surplus
income in stocks.

Trading was always exciting, and it changed my life for the better in countless
ways. I eventually founded my own financial-research company so I could study
the markets, research stocks, and pursue my trading passion full-time. The
financial rewards of trading are widely-known, I was blessed to become a millionaire
before my 30th birthday. But even if trading hadn't made me rich, I'd still
keep doing it for the vast intangible benefits. I won't stop trading until
I'm dead.

Trading is incredibly liberating, breaking a crushing bond that enslaves most
people their entire lives. Trading divorces income earned from time on task.
Salaried or not, we are all essentially paid to work by the hour. But this
is a problem, it creates an artificial ceiling on our incomes since our time
is precious and finite. We can only devote so many hours each week
to work before our lives become an unbalanced, unhappy disaster. We effectively
become financial slaves to our time available for work.

But trading earnings aren't dependent on time. When you buy a stock,
and it rallies to earn you profits, it doesn't matter whether you spent 1 hour
deciding to make that trade or 100 hours. Trading opens up a wonderful new
world where income is divorced from time! While it is true that trading is
a learned art that requires years of discipline and experience to thrive in,
the ultimate financial rewards it yields are wildly disproportionate
to the time spent learning it. It breaks your income free from the chains of
time.

The ultimate result of this liberation is the highly-sought-after goal of
financial independence. If you start trading and stick with it for decades,
you will get good. And trading mightily rewards experience, building
fortunes for those who strive to master it. Eventually your trading will at
the very least set you up to retire much earlier than you otherwise could.
And since trading doesn't require excessive time (a few hours a week of research
is often enough), it can free up many hours for you to pursue your life's passions.

Trading is a great equalizer, shattering all the limiting preconceptions that
we burden ourselves with and others impose on us. The world is tough and unforgiving,
and often we feel inadequate. The reasons are infinite. Maybe the world teases
you about something, looks down on you for some reason, or doesn't respect
you for who you are. All these crushing limitations that saddle real life are
obliterated in trading.

The markets could not care less about your background, your education,
your faith, your age, your appearance, your sex, or any real or perceived shortcomings
in your life. All that matters is your own decisions. Trading may very well
be the last true meritocracy on the planet, where everyone is free
to thrive or fail based solely on their own drive. If you diligently strive
to learn the art of trading, you can and will grow successful regardless of
where you came from, where you are, or what limitations have burdened you.

Trading feeds your brain, as it demands constant yet fascinating
learning. I call myself "a student of the markets" as I continue
to learn new things every day even after decades of trading. If I lived and
traded through 10 lifetimes, I'd still be a student of the markets. We humans
are all hard-wired to love to learn, to expand our horizons. And trading provides
learning in droves. There are always new market situations to observe, new
companies to analyze, and new factors driving the performance of stocks.

The more you trade, the more you will learn about the world around you. You
will gradually start to better understand the global economy, national economy,
business in general, and how things work. Traders view the world in a different
light, pondering how the goods and services we need and want are created and
ultimately delivered to us at a reasonable profit. Every time you buy something,
every time you interact with someone, your mind will constantly be sifting
everything for trading opportunities.

Learning is naturally empowering and self-feeding, the more you know the more
you want to know. And knowledge and diligence ultimately lead to success, which
builds self-confidence. Once you start making money trading stocks, and you
will if you apply yourself and stick with it, your whole worldview starts to
change. As your income becomes less dependent on your time on task, as the
markets reward you for the merit of your own decisions, I guarantee you will
feel better about yourself and life in general.

And this gift of learning extends far beyond the external, markets and stocks.
The greatest challenges for trading lie in your own heart. Your success depends
on harnessing your own internal greed and fear, your greatest enemies. As naturally-emotional
creatures, mastering our own emotions isn't easy. But the more you trade, the
more you will learn about yourself. It literally forces you to look deep into
your own heart, to try and dispassionately analyze the motivating forces driving
your buying and selling decisions.

The more you learn about yourself, the deeper you journey into your own emotions,
the happier you will ultimately be. This quest for emotional mastery yields
benefits far beyond the trading realm. The longer you trade, the better you
become at stepping back and calmly analyzing life situations that
make you angry, sad, frustrated, whatever. Controlling your own greed and fear
helps you better control all your emotions, making you more even-keeled and
slower to get upset in the future. Imagine the benefits this has for marriages,
family interactions, business relationships, and everything else!

Trading also yields great insights into other people. Sentiment,
how the majority of other traders view the stock markets or any given stock
at any particular time, is the most important driving force behind price movements.
Trading success demands buying low and selling high, right? The only times
stocks are low is when they are unloved and out of favor among the majority
of traders. Conversely, stocks only get high when they are popular and the
majority of traders want to buy them. Observing others' sentiment gives you
fantastic insights into life in general, and human nature, that are extremely
valuable.

Trading also develops the wonderful ability to take the long view. The tyranny
of the present is intense in this Information Age, everyone worries incessantly
about today while carelessly ignoring the past and the future. Trading forces
you to transcend today's worries to see the big picture. In order to buy low
and sell high, you have to consider any stock's history and future potential.
This grows into a universal life-wide ability to keep the present in proper
perspective, to not dwell on today's challenges out of proper context.

I've always viewed trading as analogous to the wondrous Age of Discovery when
great tall ships plied the world's oceans with exotic trading goods. They would
sail to Asia at great risk and expense, and bring back spices to Europe that
would fetch a fortune. Traders bought goods where the supply was plentiful
to transport them to where demand was great. Stock trading today is like sailing
the oceans of time. We buy trade goods (stocks) today, and hope that
demand for them (and hence their prices) will be higher in the future.

Trading demands discipline, which has unimaginably-big benefits in all aspects
of life. In order to trade, you first have to generate some surplus income.
The only way to do this is spend less than you earn. The longer that
you live below your means in general, the more you save, the richer you get.
This trading-forged discipline virtually ensures you will never have debt problems,
never be in an ugly situation where you risk losing a major asset like your
house. It leads to a much-happier and less-stressful life.

Living below your means, regardless of what they are, also loosens the hold
of money (greed) on your heart. There is nothing wrong with building wealth,
but the Bible is crystal-clear on the dangers of greed. In his first
letter to young pastor Timothy, the great Apostle Paul wrote, "For the
love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from
the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." Paradoxically
even though trading's goal is to build wealth, greed is its mortal enemy.

A parallel trait greatly enhanced by trading stocks yourself is stewardship.
We are all blessed with financial assets, and how we manage them is of paramount
importance for our futures. No one cares more about your financial future than
you do! Trading stocks forces you to take more responsibility for growing your
assets, gets you deeply involved in what you invest in and why. While it is
important to seek wisdom on investing from wise counselors, trading gives you
the knowledge to ultimately make informed decisions yourself. This leads to
radically-better stewardship of your financial assets and entire future.

Trading builds honor and integrity like few other things can. Why? You are completely at
the mercy of your own decisions. When you make a trade that doesn't work out,
and it happens often as losing is a major part of trading, you have no one
to blame but yourself. Sadly we live in an era where personal responsibility
and accountability are dying, people prefer to blame others for their own poor
decisions. But when trading you have no choice but to be fully responsible
and accountable. Nourishing these positive traits greatly impacts all areas
in your life and relationships for the better.

Trading hones diligence and perseverance, maybe the most important life skills
of all. Like life, trading has many setbacks so opportunities to get discouraged
are legion. But if you stick with it, keep your nose to the grindstone for
months, then years, and then decades, you will succeed. The single
most-important ingredient for success is to simply stubbornly keep doing something
until you naturally learn enough to get good at it! Most elite traders, CEOs,
athletes, or any professionals became that way not because they had advantages
up front, but simply because they never gave up despite the inevitable
setbacks.

Incredibly, trading also helps you socially! Not only does its built-in achievement
bolster self-confidence, it makes you more interesting to everyone you meet.
Over the decades I've talked one-on-one with many hundreds, maybe thousands,
of people about trading stocks. And 99% of them are utterly fascinated by the
prospect. And who wouldn't be? The markets are endlessly fascinating, and the
allure of divorcing income earned from time on task is great. It is really
fun sharing what you are doing in the markets with others, helping them see
and seize the same stock opportunities you are.

If you are a parent, I'm sure you want your kids to excel in all these critical
life traits. Trading is a great way to teach them! Start your kids out young,
it's easy and fun. When you take them out to their favorite restaurant, talk
with them about the process of getting the food to their plates. Tell them
about all the workers from the farmers to the truckers to the cooks, who labor
hard and earn a profit for their part in the food chain. If the restaurant
is publicly-traded, explain to your kids that they can own a small piece of
this business themselves!

Open up a trading account for your kids. It really doesn't matter how much
money you can spare, the kids can gradually fund it themselves with cash gifts
they receive on birthdays and Christmas and through doing odd jobs. As they
slowly buy and sell a few shares in stocks they are interested in because they
love the products those companies produce, they will learn the same trading
lessons and develop the same awesome life-traits as adults. And starting young,
even casual trading as a hobby can literally earn your kids fortunes over their
lifetimes. This skillset will almost certainly radically improve their lives.

Teaching kids about business and stocks is very empowering for them, they
naturally love to learn. It instills in them a broad practical worldview most
people never experience, and increases the odds they will nurture their entrepreneurial
side and ultimately do fulfilling work they love. The earlier anyone starts
learning about trading, and all the necessary peripheral topics like sound
money management, the more successful they will ultimately be.

On the other end of the age spectrum, trading is equally beneficial to the
elderly. Sadly many people get bored in old age, it's tragic. They don't exercise
their brains so gradually their minds turn to mush. Trading, since it demands
endless learning, can seriously slow or even reverse this unfortunate deterioration.
Trading provides excitement for elderly folks, helping them feel plugged in
to the world again. It gives them something cool to talk about with their friends,
kids, and grandchildren. I'm going to continue trading until the day I die
to keep my mind in training and razor-sharp.

So trading is awesome, everyone should trade stocks. Easy for me to say, right?
What if you don't have any money? Believe me, that's not a problem at all.
Almost every trader in the world started out with nothing, zero. Traders start
small, trading a tiny amount they can afford to lose when trades inevitably
move against them. But gradually as your knowledge of the markets, stock trading,
your own emotions, and market sentiment around you grows, so too will your
success. There are endless accounts of traders starting out with a few-hundred
dollars and ending up multi-millionaires a couple decades or so later.

Starting out small is actually really important. If you start out
trading with a lot of money, odds are you will lose it and get discouraged.
The great majority of traders lose almost all of their initial capital at some
point in their first year or so of trading. It is par for the course. But the
hard lessons learned, and the skillset developed through those early losses,
scale beautifully to any amount of money as your trading prowess grows. Even
if you are blessed with lots of surplus capital, start trading small with an
amount you can easily afford to lose. As your confidence and skills gradually
grow, only then should you start trading bigger.

The amount traded is totally irrelevant. If you can earn a 20% return on $1000
in your earlier years, you can earn a 20% return on $100k or $1m as your capital
grows. The critical thing is just to get trading, start small and
start learning the lessons stock trading teaches. Get your greed and fear under
control and grow your understanding of the markets and stocks when you have
little on the line. This foundation is essential to help you thrive someday
in the future when you are risking a lot.

The hardest part of starting trading is making the commitment to live below
your means. Trading is seeded with surplus income. Everyone has areas of fat
we can cut from our lives. For example, I love reading. It's my favorite leisure
activity. If I was a new trader and cash was tight, instead of buying new books
I could simply check them out for free from my local library. If you think
hard, almost regardless of your income today you can probably find a way to
scrape some surplus together over a year or so.

Stock trading is intimidating when you are first starting, but so
is everything else. Things like hobbies or interests you hold dear and really
enjoy today were once overwhelming to you too. Think about how intimidating
it would be to learn golf, or gardening, or photography from scratch. Everything new
is intimidating, and trading is no exception. But also like everything else,
the more you get into it the more comfortable you will grow. And you will have
a lot of fun along the way learning about the markets and stocks.

We can certainly help you if you are interested in learning about stock trading.
Every week I write essays like
this one, discussing some aspect of the markets. A few years ago I wrote a
popular essay called "Stock
Trading 101". It will help you grow your knowledge and accelerate
your understanding of the key core fundamentals of stock trading. The more
you read about the markets and stocks, even if you don't understand everything
(heck, I still don't understand it all!), the faster your knowledge will grow.

My company also publishes the research my business partners and I do to use
in our own ongoing stock trading. Our flagship products are acclaimed weekly and monthly subscription
newsletters that analyze what is going on in the markets, with the explicit
goal of finding high-probability-for-success stock trades. Since 2001, all
222 stock trades we've closed in Zeal Intelligence have averaged annualized
realized gains of +43.2%! Has your capital grown at 40%+ a year over
the past decade? Subscribe today and
start thriving!

We also do deep fundamental research into individual stocks so we can figure
out which ones are the most promising to buy. We just finished our latest project
spending 3 months looking at nearly 100 silver stocks trading in the US and
Canada. We spent several-hundred hours gradually whittling this universe down
to our dozen favorites fundamentally. Then we profiled these elite silver stocks
in a new 34-page report. For
just $95, you can enjoy the fruits of several months of expert research. Buy
a report today!

The bottom line is everyone should trade stocks. The most obvious reason is
for the financial rewards, the financial independence this pursuit ultimately
yields. But the crucible of trading also forges many awesome traits that greatly
enrich your entire life. It forces you to learn and grow your brain, it demands
strict emotional control. It creates discipline, honor, integrity, responsibility,
diligence, and perseverance.

While sticking with trading will almost certainly make you rich eventually,
the journey is truly more rewarding than the destination. You will see the
world differently once you start trading stocks, everything will become more
interesting. You will feel liberated and empowered. Life in general will be
better as trading forces you to nurture your good traits while starving your
destructive ones. And it is never too late or too early to start.

If you have questions I would be more than happy to address
them through my private consulting business. Please visit www.zealllc.com/financial.htm for
more information.

Thoughts, comments, flames, letter-bombs? Fire away at zelotes@zealllc.com.
Due to my staggering and perpetually increasing e-mail load, I regret that
I am not able to respond to comments personally. I WILL read all messages though,
and really appreciate your feedback!

Mr. Hamilton, a private investor and contrarian analyst,
publishes Zeal Intelligence, an in-depth monthly strategic and tactical analysis
of markets, geopolitics, economics, finance, and investing delivered from an
explicitly pro-free market and laissez faire perspective. Please visit www.ZealLLC.com for
more information, www.zealllc.com/samples.htm for a free sample, and www.zealllc.com/subscribe.htm to
subscribe.